Tag Archives: Colby

The Chatham-Kent council requested a report on the potential health impacts of wind turbines from their local public health officer, Dr. Colby. He did some research and produced this report, which is commonly known as Colby (2008). It covered several areas of potential health problems – noise, flicker, accidents and so on. I looked at just the noise section, going through it sentence by sentence, following up on what the references really said. This was the first of two Colby health studies, the second was as a part of the AWEA/CanWEA Expert Panel.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) ganged together to produce this literature review of studies on health effects of wind turbines. They paid 7 “experts” (none of whom was an epidemiologist), one of whom was the same Dr. Colby who had previously staked out his position with the Chatham-Kent Health Study. This study is also known as Colby (2009) since he was alphabetically first.

Like the earlier Colby work, this one never went into the field to see what was really going on. It was published 3 days after the release of Dr. Pierpont’s Wind Turbine Syndrome and spent a great deal of ink disparaging her book. It recognized that not much was known about some of the effects of wind turbines but then astonishingly recommended no further study.